Mobile Internet users in some markets use prepaid or noncontract mobile service. If these users run into short term personal cash flow issues, it may result in reduced and/or interrupted Internet service. Large prepaid “data bundles” offer volume discounts (per byte) but tie up valuable cash, whereas using pay-as-you-go phone credits for Internet is extremely expensive (per byte).
Some network traffic, for example traffic to/from a specific website, may be subsidized, thereby providing a discount to the user for bytes used to access that specific website. While it may be possible to track the data used to access the specific site, it is more difficult to handle “apps”, because the network traffic is not simply to/from a single host or domain. For example, a page load for a news content website may load resources from many different domains, such as the news content provider, the advertising content provider, the user traffic tracking service, etc. Protocols are also evolving, such as the increased use of HTTP/2, or other protocols built directly on top of transmission control protocol (TCP) connections to load app data (such as WebSocket). Forcing app developers to shoehorn their products into network traffic patterns optimized for making network usage tabulation more convenient is undesirable.